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A 'Friday' night to remember: Celebrity-filled Carnegie Hall bash the concert of 2009

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY,
Irish Voice Arts Editor

Published Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 9:33 AM
Updated Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 10:41 AM

 

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Gavin Friday on stage at Carnegie Hall with Bono and The Edge
Gavin Friday on stage at Carnegie Hall with Bono and The Edge

On Sunday night Carnegie Hall in New York took a little breather from its usual classical fare to host an Irish rock invasion headlined by the incomparable Gavin Friday, the solo singer-songwriter who once fronted the notorious Virgin Prunes.

“An Evening With Gavin Friday and Friends” was a 50th birthday celebration for Friday hosted by his famous friends in aid of Red Nights, a concert series designed to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. It was also a thrilling retrospective on the work of the Virgin Prunes, as performed by singers as distinctive as Rufus Wainwright and Bono.

Friday hails from Ballymun in Dublin, at one time considered the worst projects in the city, so to find himself headlining at Carnegie Hall is an unlikely coup.

“Isn’t that great though?” he told IrishCentral’s sister publication the Irish Voice. “I don’t have time to think about it, though, because right now I’m on autopilot. I’m not going to over-think it. It’s a good way to keep happy you know, by staying true to yourself, by saying, ah the hell with it, this is what I want to do, you know?”

But who were the Virgin Prunes? Introducing Friday on Sunday night, U2’s manager Paul McGuinness appeared onstage in a pinstriped Louis Copeland suit to give the crowd a quick rock history lesson.

“The Virgin Prunes were the band that always opened for U2, so I got to see a lot of them,” McGuinness told the crowd. “I saw more of them than perhaps I would have liked. One night Bono came up to me and said, ‘What’s wrong with the crowd? They’re in an awful mood.’

“I explained to him that 10 minutes earlier the Virgin Prunes has thrown pigs intestines at them all. They were into Dada performance art at that point. They called it the theater of cruelty.”

Friday, it must be said, is a great star, possibly the most charismatic torch singer that Ireland has ever produced. It’s evident the moment he takes to the stage, all swagger and poise, that this man was born to be famous, and his music is the vehicle that takes him there.

Some people wonder why Bono and Gavin Friday are rarely photographed on the same stage at the same time. Possibly it’s because they suspect they might be one and the same person.

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